Talk:Charlemagne (747-814)
Number-crunching See http://genealogyofpresidents.blogspot.com/ : :Some genealogists claim to have mathematically demonstrated how all Americans of European descent must be related to Charlemagne. In this regard, genealogists have established the exact lines of descent from Charlemagne for 14 U.S. Presidents. Two of these are President George W. Bush and his father President George H.W. Bush. Other Presidents whose descent from Charlemagne have been traced include: George Washington, Ulysses Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gerald Ford. To demonstrate how we are all related, the New England Historical Society has researched the genealogy of Barack Obama and determined that on his mother's side he is related to six other previous presidents: George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and James Madison...." How do our numbers compare? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:52, 27 April 2009 (UTC) "Related to" is not the same as "descended from". Here's another assessment, in extracts from RootsWeb's GEN-MEDIEVAL-L Archives, a 1996 statement by D. Spencer Hines: "the number of Living Descendants of Charlemagne is more than 100 million folks and less than 1 billion." ... "Knowledgable Europeans have recently told me that half 50% of the entire European population is descended from Charlemagne." ... "... the 100 million that Gary Boyd Roberts appears to be saying are in the United States ..." ... "The tentative benchmark figure of 600 million descendants would mean that approximately one person in 10 alive today is a Descendant of Charlemagne." — Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:43, 30 May 2009 (UTC) "Invalid time" Several children have "Invalid time" in their birth or death boxes. I just gave Adelaide and Pepin full edits, checking that the dates were in proper form, but they still show as "invalid" on a reload of KdG's page. Maybe such things take time? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:12, May 20, 2010 (UTC) I think I fixed this. I removed some of the bracketed "sources" in the proceeding fields and now all children birth & death date info displays properly. MainTour (talk) 01:30, November 25, 2018 (UTC) Discussions of his family Discussion of Charlemagne's family with references: http://sbaldw.home.mindspring.com/hproject/prov/charl000.htm Jim LaLone 16:25, June 28, 2010 (UTC) In 2017 we have further discussion of his ancestors and descendants on Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval. One interesting extract is (with my emphasis added): ---- On Thursday, January 12, 2017 at 10:23:35 AM UTC-8, wjhonson wrote: > If every living person were atDNA tested, would we be able to reconstruct the DNA of Charlemagne? No. :Richard Smith 13 Jan As Todd says, not remotely. As far as I'm aware, only two of Charlemagne's children have credible descents to modern times: they are Pepin of Italy, and Louis the Pious. Each would have inherited roughly half of his DNA from Charlemagne. This means that we expect roughly a quarter of Charlemagne's DNA not to have been inherited by either of these two children. That part of his DNA is essentially unknowable. A further quarter of his DNA was only inherited by Pepin of Italy. The only documented descent to modern times from Pepin is through his son Bernard of Italy. Bernard only inherited half of his DNA from Pepin, so that's half of the quarter of Charlemagne's DNA that only Pepin inherited lost. That's now three-eights of his DNA lost. We can keep doing this, and at each step more DNA is lost. There are no documented descents from an ancestor of Charlemagne that does not pass through Charlemagne himself, so there's no possibility of inferring this lost DNA from them. At best, possibly a few fragments of his DNA have survived to present and could be identified through detailed autosomal DNA testing of the whole population. Richard ---- Comments on above So no modern descendants of Bertha? Bertha (779-823)/descendants shows 12 great-great-grandchildren with their own descendant tabs; did all die out? And none from Alpaida? I've just traced some of her descendants through Familypedia links down to Friedrich III., Deutscher Kaiser (1831-1888)/descendants, which shows several living persons. And mo modern descendants of Pepin's other children? See Theodrade of Italy (?-?)/descendants for a promising set of descendant pages. Maybe one of our experts should take it up with the learned (and other) contributors to that newsgroup? -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 22:58, January 14, 2017 (UTC) Ancestry See Talk:Charlemagne_(747-814)/tree for ancestry discussion. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:36, January 15, 2017 (UTC) Remove Family line of Alpaida (794-) I moved Alpaida (794-) and her mother to the 10th spouse slot for Charlemagne (747-814) with the recommendation that we delete her and all of her descendants. Not one of these is listed in Wikipedia / GENI or any other known source. Plus there is at least 10 generations that appear to be totally made up and ficticious. I am voting for this family line to be removed entirely. In fact I cannot find any listing for any of the Counts of Bassigny (See Category) (ie Gosselin I de Bassigny (c836-c861) or any of his ancestors.) For something as extremely important as Project Charlemagne - I think we need to be accurate with good documentation and not just throwing names up here. MainTour (talk) 01:35, November 25, 2018 (UTC)